The present disclosure relates generally to detection of chemical and biological analytes and has specific applicability to nucleic acid sequencing.
The determination of nucleic acid sequence information is important in biological and medical research. Sequence information is used for identifying gene associations with diseases and phenotypes, identifying potential drug targets, and understanding the mechanisms of disease development and progress. Sequence information is an important part of personalized medicine, where it can be used to optimize the diagnosis, treatment, or prevention of disease for a specific individual.
Many scientists and medical practitioners struggle to tap into modern sequencing technology due to prohibitive costs to run and maintain complex instrumentation in current commercial offerings. These platforms favor centralized laboratories in which expensive “factory scale” instruments are run by highly trained specialists, and samples are batched to achieve economies of scale. This centralized system offers very little flexibility in terms of performance specifications—users are forced into ecosystems that are unnecessarily limited in scope and variety of use. When it comes to clinical applications, the centralized model is costly for doctors and their patients in terms of both the time and money required to ship patient samples from local clinics to distant sequencing labs. Further delays can be incurred as a centralized sequencing lab waits to receive sufficient number of samples to batch together into an economical run. Other applied markets such as forensics, veterinary diagnostics, food safety, agricultural analysis and environmental analysis suffer similar limitations.
Thus, there is a need for a sequencing platform that is better suited for use in local laboratories in support of a decentralized system of research and clinical care. The present invention satisfies this need and provides related advantages as well.